War and the Clearance Sale

I had an interesting exchange in one of my classes this past week. Our assignment in this class for the day was to rank a given list of issues in order of importance from 1 to 10. Not only did they include standard political issues like “the economy and jobs,” “terrorism and war,” and “healthcare” but a myriad of environmental ones including “human population growth” and “climate change” (which makes sense as this is an environmental studies class). What struck me though was when we were asked to form a consensus among ever larger groups (from two to four to eight) and how few students were concerned about “terrorism and war.”